Are Women Derived from an Un-needed Rib? (aka - Who Sidelined Eve)

Septuagint

πτωμα δε αυτω ητοιμασται εξαισιον

vex him with distressing hunger: and a signal destruction has been prepared for him.​​​​​​​

Vulgate

adtenuetur fame robur eius et inedia invadat costas illius

His strength shall be wasted with famine, and let hunger invade his ribs

Wycliffe

His strengthe be maad feble bi hungur; and pouert asaile hise ribbis.

King James Bible
His strength shall be hungerbitten, and destruction shall be ready at his side.
English Revised Version
His strength shall be hunger-bitten and calamity shall be ready for his halting.

JPS Tanakh 1917
His trouble shall be ravenous, And calamity shall be ready for his fall.

GOD'S WORD Translation
Hunger undermines his strength. Disaster is waiting beside him.

Jonathan Lipnik - https://blog.israelbiblicalstudies.com/holy-land-studies/why-was-eve-created-from-adams-rib/

The verb “to limp” (צלע) is taken from the same three letters as “rib” (צלע) because it involves walking on the side, just as the ribs encase the abdomen from the sides.

Vulgate Gen 2:22

Immisit ergo Dominus Deus soporem in Adam: cumque obdormisset, tulit unam de costis ejus, et replevit carnem pro ea.

Then the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon Adam: and when he was fast asleep, he took one of his costis, and filled up flesh for it.

Costis – dative / ablative (to/with/by/for/from)

Costarum – Genitive plural (of)

Plato's Symposium, Speech of Aristophanes c. C4 BCE

In the first place, let me treat of the nature of man and what has happened to it; for the original human nature was not like the present, but different. The sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two

In the second place, the primeval man was round, his back and sides forming a circle; and he had four hands and four feet, one head with two faces, looking opposite ways, set on a round neck and precisely alike; also four ears, two privy members, and the remainder to correspond. He could walk upright as men now do, backwards or forwards as he pleased, and he could also roll over and over at a great pace, turning on his four hands and four feet, eight in all, like tumblers going over and over with their legs in the air; this was when he wanted to run fast.

Terrible was their might and strength, and the thoughts of their hearts were great, and they made an attack upon the gods; of them is told the tale of Otys and Ephialtes who, as Homer says, dared to scale heaven, and would have laid hands upon the gods... The gods could not suffer their insolence to be unrestrained.

At last, after a good deal of reflection, Zeus discovered a way. He said: "Methinks I have a plan which will humble their pride and improve their manners; men shall continue to exist, but I will cut them in two and then they will be diminished in strength and increased in numbers; this will have the advantage of making them more profitable to us. They shall walk upright on two legs, and if they continue insolent and will not be quiet, I will split them again and they shall hop about on a single leg." He spoke and cut men in two, like a sorb-apple which is halved for pickling, or as you might divide an egg with a hair; and as he cut them one after another, he bade Apollo give the face and the half of the neck a turn in order that the man might contemplate the section of himself: he would thus learn a lesson of humility. Apollo was also bidden to heal their wounds and compose their forms. So he gave a turn to the face and pulled the skin from the sides all over that which in our language is called the belly, like the purses which draw in, and he made one mouth at the centre, which he fastened in a knot (the same which is called the navel); he also moulded the breast and took out most of the wrinkles, much as a shoemaker might smooth leather upon a last; he left a few, however, in the region of the belly and navel, as a memorial of the primeval state. After the division the two parts of man, each desiring his other half, came together, and throwing their arms about one another, entwined in mutual embraces, longing to grow into one, they were on the point of dying from hunger and self-neglect, because they did not like to do anything apart; and when one of the halves died and the other survived, the survivor sought another mate, man or woman as we call them, being the sections of entire men or women, and clung to that.

Bible moralisèe: “The Creation of Eve” and “The Birth of Ecclesia,” fol. 2v (detail), ONB Han. Cod. 2554, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. Made in Paris, 1225–49.

Victoria Emily Jones

http://www.artway.eu/content.php?id=2438&action=show&lang=en

Bibles moralisées (moralized Bibles) are lavish picture books originating in thirteenth-century France that pair episodes from scripture with allegorical interpretations—image interpreting image. Captions are given, but the pictures dominate and do the main interpretive work.

The Bible moralisée known as Vienna 2554 from the Austrian National Library is the most famous and one of the earliest of what is a relatively small genre. Each of its thousand-plus miniatures is framed within a medallion, a presentation common to Gothic stained glass, which are then arranged on each page into two parallel columns of four. A top-right detail from folio 2v is shown above: the Creation of Eve as a prefiguration of the Birth of the Church.

The Bible itself allows for this extrapolation, as when, for example, God says in Isaiah 42:14, “I will cry out like a woman in labor; I will gasp and pant,” a possible prophecy of the pangs Jesus would endure on the cross. And John’s mention of the “blood and water” that gushed from Christ’s side wound could allude to the amniotic fluids of birth. Eighteenth-century Moravian piety centralized the importance of the side wound as a symbol of salvation, lauding it as a “motherly womb,” [2] a descriptor reinforced by the many devotional images Moravians produced of the wound isolated from Christ’s body and resembling female anatomy. (This had precedence in late medieval French and English manuscripts.

But not only is Christ our mother, he is also our spouse, much like Adam was both “mother” and spouse to Eve. Just as the first Eve sprung to life from a tear in her husband’s flesh, so did the church come into being out of the torn flesh of Christ. Were it not for Christ’s death, our union with him would not be possible; the church would not exist.

Ephesians 5

25 Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her 26 to make her holy. In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. 29 After all, no one ever hated their own body, but they feed and care for their body, just as Christ does the church— 30 for we are members of his body.31 “For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.” (Gen 2:24) This is a profound mystery—but I am talking about Christ and the church.

To: Alison Price <[email protected]>
Subject: Leon Underwood - Birth of Eve 1929

Hi,

I’ve been looking at Leon Underwood’s Birth of Eve and would love to know the view from the other direction from the photo on-line.

Is that something you can help with?

Where is the work? If it is viewable in London, I would love to see it. Or are there other photographs available?

There is a history in the Christian artistic presentation of the creation of the first woman as a homunculus – a sort of subsidiary human being built up from the dominant figure of a sleeping Adam. But there is a tradition in Rabbinic Biblical commentary that the first human being was a bi-gendered singular creation comprising of both male and female parts that were split into two equal second humans; one male and one female. That’s based on an understanding of the Hebrew word ‘Tzela’ (often translated as ‘rib’) actually meaning a ‘side.’ It suggests an entirely different aetiology of women – and one much less disagreeable than the notion that women are created sub-man.

It looks, both from the Birth of Eve that you hold, and another Underwood work, that Underwood might have been aware of that rabbinic tradition – which also has a foothold in Plato’s Symposium. But it’s not clear from the view of the sculpture on your site.

Interview with Marsha Rowe

Creative Review 28/5/2015

The name Spare Rib started as a joke, with its play on words about the Biblical Eve fashioned out of Adam’s rib, implying that a woman had no independence from the beginning of time. This held the witty, subversive connotations we had been looking for. Once Rosie [Boycott, co-founder] had agreed with me on the name, she and I worked with two designers, Kate Hepburn and Sally Doust, who created the overall design of the magazine.